Born on June 21 1948, Ian Russell McEwan grew up in Aldershot, as well as at military stations in countries such as Singapore and Libya. His mother had two much older children from an earlier marriage, but McEwan always considered himself very much “an only child” right up to the point in 2007 when a long-lost brother was suddenly made known to him. The new sibling, David, was the product of an affair McEwan's mother had had with his father during the war, before they were married.
After an army childhood largely spent abroad, McEwan attended Woolverstone state boarding-school in Suffolk from 1959 to 1966. Subsequently he read English and French at the University of Sussex before enrolling for the modern fiction and …
Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are not a subscriber, please click here to read about membership. All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors.